by Geert Mak
We talk about what came afterwards, about the differences between Poles and the rest, about how the misleading symbol of the Berlin Wall made it seem as though an abrupt end had come to communism everywhere at the same time. In reality, the old communist elites in Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria remained in power for years, although they operated under a new, nationalistic flag. The Hungarians and the Poles, on the other hand, had done away with the old communism long before the wall fell. Hungary joined the IMF and the World Bank in 1982, the country had been living for years with a mixed socialist-capitalist economy. The Polish leader, General Jaruzelski, had been following the same line since 1981: first heavy oppression to put an end to the strikes and uprisings, then a gradual thaw and economic liberalisation. The state of emergency and the censorship were relaxed from July 1983; in 1986 Poland joined the IMF. After that the country became increasingly free. Krawczyk: ‘When I was twenty, I had no problem hitchhiking to Italy. And that was a real shock, let me tell you. Our reality was so drab. And suddenly there you were in that gleaming, colourful Venice. Horrible.’
His girlfriend comes in – a beautiful, friendly woman – and for a little while our table seems aglow. She works for the Soros Foundation, the Eastern European network that uses the Hungarian-American billionaire's money to help stimulate democratic processes.‘Because of her, I'm getting a divorce,’ Krawczyk says, and falls silent for a moment. Then: ‘We're all Soros’ whores. At least, that's what Radio Maryja says. The church, Poland, that's the only real Europe. But Soros superimposes his own Europe on top of that, the Europe of the liberals, intellectuals, Jews. Yes, I'm sorry, but that's the way those people talk.’ His girlfriend agrees, yes, that's the way they talk, but she cannot stay any longer. Her son has announced that he's going to try out vodka with Tabasco sauce, and she wants to be there when he does it.
As the evening goes by, Krawczyk and I sink into a pleasant kind of melancholy.‘You people with your money. We're expected to accept whatever you people in the West say about us, but don't you ever wonder what we might have to offer? The assertiveness of the Poles, the circumspection of the Czechs, the perseverance of the Hungarian dissidents, the dilemmas the East Germans have been faced with? Isn't that exactly what the West needs? Things like that? Courage, principles, experience?’
Eastern Poland is a frozen white plain of thickets, birch forests, little villages and the occasional smokestack giving off a courageous white plume. This is the land of Radio Maryja, of all those millions – a quarter of the population, according to Anna Bikont – who feel no affinity whatsoever with the new Polish society. The countless small farmers, for example, who operate on the same postage-stamp scale as their grandparents. The workers from the bankrupt agricultural collectives, for whom there is no work anywhere. Listen to Radio Maryja: prayers, Ave Marias, calls from listeners, stories about poverty, old age, illness, misfortune, a priest who promises to help, and then a speech: do you have any idea how many Jews there are in the Polish parliament and cabinet? Then another prayer, everything is sinful, the world is sullied, only Radio Maryja and Poland can save us.
The Warsaw-Moscow Express is packed with merchants who drag their own wares along with them. The overhead baggage racks are full of packages and bundles, the men fill the corridors and compartments with their goods before starting in on some serious drinking. A big, bare-chested fellow is smoking in the corridor, a half-naked woman in a pink bra is pressing up against him. Every stop lasts forever: along this transit route the loading and unloading never ends, textiles, cheap radios, nondescript electronics.
At the dusky station in Brest, on the border with Belarus, the carriages are stormed by women. For a few measly cents they will sell you milk, bread, cheese, vodka and themselves. A pretty, curvaceous woman throws open the door of my compartment: would I be interested in buying a friendly little half-litre? And might it not be a good idea for us to knock it back together, just to ward off the chill? During all this, the carriages are being rolled into a huge shed for a nineteenth century workers’ ballet: the wheels are loosened at lightning speed, the cars jacked up, broader wheels are installed and then the whole thing is lowered onto the rails again, wrenches clatter, the women hop off the train, and within the hour we are off speeding through the cold once more.
In the restaurant car, two carriages down, the passengers have made themselves at home. They've taken off their shoes, cheerful music is playing, and the bottle goes from hand to hand. I sit down at the table with Pyotr Nikonov and Anatoli Grigoryev, two officials from the Russian Border and Excise Service, animated and cheerful after a party with their Belorussian comrades. ‘We've just celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Russian customs office in Brest!’ I make a quick calculation: that was in autumn 1939. Both of them have sons, life is not particularly easy for them, but they remain loyal to President Yeltsin. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Things haven't really become much better for you, have they?’
‘No, you're right, but he's our president. When Gorbachev was our president, I thought he was okay. Because he was our president.’
The restaurant car is furnished like a village café; in the little kitchen a woman with greasy, stringy hair is frying lumps of dough, a tired, skinny man is leaning behind the bar, an old woman is working her way down the aisles with vodka and pretzels. A Pole begins playing the harmonica, the carriage rocks like a ship at sea, the old woman shows us a few lively dance steps. She speaks a few words of German, and asks me where I'm from, how old I am, what my name is. She goes into the kitchen, then comes back. ‘Olga,’ she says, pointing to the exhausted woman frying dumplings, ‘finds you very attractive. Wouldn't you like to keep her company for a while?’ I tell her that I'm already well taken care of in Amsterdam. She laughs, passes the message along, comes back again. ‘Olga says Amsterdam is far away, and she's here, right now …’
Chapter SIXTY-ONE
Moscow
‘SO THERE WE WERE, ANGRY AND INSPIRED, AT THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE of the Lie, and somehow we had to find a way to survive,’ the pop journalist Artemi Troitski wrote of Moscow in the 1980s. One Russian rock singer spoke of his contemporaries as the generation of ‘concierges and night-watchmen’, which was nothing less than the truth. Young Russian people took the lowliest, worst-paid jobs in order to remain independent of the state system, and to spend as much time as possible on what really mattered to them: tusovka, which may be freely translated as ‘the mood’ or ‘the big mess’. Troitski: ‘No other generation has ever produced so many musicians, painters, photographers and otherwise artistically oriented young people. And, at the same time, we had more young alcoholics, drug addicts and prostitutes than ever before. For them, it was not about protest – not about saying “to hell with the entire system” – no, life itself was simply so dull and shitty that there was nothing left for them to do. That same generation, by the way, also provided the country with a horde of unbelievable bureaucrats.’
During the final years of the Soviet Empire, rock musicians and their followers were the real dissidents, more so than the country's writers. Their concerts were attended by thousands of young people, and their lyrics spoke of things not openly addressed anywhere else: the defeat in Afghanistan, corruption, the abuse of power. Viktor Tsoi, a kind of cross between James Dean and Bruce Lee, wrote:
Changes.
In our laughter, in our tears and in our veins.
Changes.
We're waiting for changes …
The singer Boris Grebenshtshikov filled one stadium after another with lyrics that just made it past the censor:
Sons of the days of silence
Look at other people's films
Play other people's roles
Knock on other people's doors.
Please, won't you give a sip of water
To the sons of the days of silence?
A text by the rocker and poet Misha Borzykin:
Throw off the yoke,
Sing what you feel inside,
> We have a right to roar,
Break loose, we were born to be free,
Break loose, get away from here!
The band received standing ovations, the communist officials went pale, and Borzykin succeeded in getting himself banned in Moscow even at the height of perestroika.
Children of Glasnost is the much-acclaimed book that Artemi Troitski wrote about them afterwards. After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1994, a Dutch colleague and I went to visit him. He told us about how he had recently come across a wedding photograph, taken in 1984. ‘There are about thirty people in that picture, all of them friends from the music and art scenes. When I picked it up and looked at it I suddenly realised that, even though it was only ten years ago, I was seeing a completely different world.’
That picture was taken right after the Brezhnev era, a period Troitski says was marked by complete paralysis, by a comatose atmosphere in which no one believed in anything any more, and in which no one had any interest in the rest of the world. ‘At the time that picture was taken we talked about music, about friends, about sex and drugs and alcohol, but we never talked about the future. We weren't interested in the future. We thought nothing would ever change. The only thing left to salvage was our inner freedom.’
Ten years later, in 1994, the idols of Soviet illegality were wildly popular everywhere. Troitski could name all of the thirty men and women in that picture, he counted off their lives on his fingers, that old club of friends, that band of dissidents. A number of them were not available for comment: they were dead. They had been killed in accidents or had fallen ill, with alcohol usually playing a key role in the story. Some of them had passionately yearned for a turnaround, but when that arrived they were unable to cope with the new, risky life it brought. Of the dozen girls in that photograph, almost half had left the country. One of the boys had become a movie star. A few others, active at the time in the Komsomol, had become successful businessmen. Others were bus drivers or teachers. But the one thing that applied to all of them was that, after 1984, none of them were ever the same. They had all experienced major rifts in their lives, for better or for worse. And none of them had an inkling of that at the moment the shutter clicked.
Ten years later, Troitski was a famous journalist, he owned his own record label and had a regular talk show on TV. He was faced with only one major problem: there were no more good pop groups to write about. ‘The Russian underground was always fed by its resistance to the party, to the bosses and the KGB. It was us against them, and that was our main source of inspiration. The same went for the underground writers, poets, film-makers and artists. After perestroika, that game was suddenly over, and all the arts had to go looking for new forms.’
After leaving Troitski, we went looking for a few of those old pop heroes. My colleague knew them all from the early days. We found Misha Borzykin and his former guitarist Sasha Belyayev in the cellar of an old theatre in St Petersburg which was now a squat. In 1987, their band Televizor had thrown half the Soviet Union into a panic with the lyric: ‘The fish is rotting around the head, they're all liars, the fish is rotting around the head.’ Now they were sitting at a darkened table, drinking vodka and eating sausage. They were doing their best to bury an old grudge. Sasha had set up a travel agency, and Misha had revived Televizor. The band was going well, but all his old fans had disappeared. ‘Half of them have turned to drink,’ Misha said, ‘and the other half went into business for themselves. Within two years they forgot what music was about.’
Later that evening we went to Sasha's flat to celebrate a friendship restored. There was plenty of food and drink, but soon Misha nodded off with his head on the table. We went on drinking and singing, and he lay on the sofa and could not be roused. The next day we met him at a crowded metro station; he'd said he wanted to show us some lyrics, some of his newest work. He pushed a crumpled sheet of paper into our hands, turned on his heels and was off. We read:
I don't like having guests in my head
they don't give a fuck about me
they come to gobble up my secrets
to drink my soul
to breathe my air
they wear friends’ faces
and I, hospitable lackey that I am,
I smile.
Today, on 24 November, 1999, it's eighteen degrees below zero, the cars in Moscow sport icy moustaches, but the Volgas and Ladas steam along as though nothing has changed. The newspaper runs a picture of pensioner Nikolai Skasylov, bundled up warmly, fishing in a hole in the frozen Moskva. ‘One fish lasts us three days,’ he says. ‘Not bad!’
Russia is doing well these days. The flirtation with the West is over, the price of oil is back to thirty-five dollars a barrel, the IMF has nothing more to complain about. In Moscow, for reasons unknown, an apartment building with a hundred people in it has been bombed, President Yeltsin has fingered his successor (fresh-faced former KGB agent Vladimir Putin), investigations into corruption within the presidential entourage have been suspended, the reports from the Chechen front are bringing patriotic Russian blood to a boil. No one in the cafés has any desire to speak English any more: go learn Russian, stranger. Doors are being closed, borders drawn, just like that, without the help of a single politician.
The McDonald's in Pushkin Square is packed all day with schoolgirls, businessmen, old ladies, housewives and children celebrating their birthdays. No one here is extremely rich or extremely poor, this is the new Moscow middle class par excellence. For a hamburger and a soft drink they calmly count out half a week's wage. The department stores are full of television sets, video cameras, refrigerators and washing machines. The vacuum cleaners are just as expensive as they are in the Netherlands, and they are going fast. At the delicatessens, the gilded pillars and richly decorated ceilings give the impression that nothing has really changed since the days of Czar Nicholas II. The tone of the language spoken here has made a drastic shift. ‘Democrat’ has become a swear word, ‘privatisation’ is synonymous with ‘robbery’, ‘free market’ with ‘chaos’, ‘businessman’ with ‘mafioso’, ‘the West’ with ‘humiliation’.
In the Revolution Square metro station, a young violinist is playing something which I believe is by Scarlatti. He is barely twenty, he has a wispy beard and obviously a great deal of talent. His nose is red from the cold, and on a morning like this, he says, he earns one dollar. A little further along, a group of older people, most of them women, have queued up. They have their money in one hand and an application form of some kind in the other. In a heated cubbyhole between two swinging doors, a man and woman have set up a little office: they are trading in impressively printed and stamped bonds, reminiscent of the old Russian Railways coupons, documents laden with hope and security.
But I am on my way to see Anatoli Artsybarski, former commander of the Mir space station. Cosmonauts in the Soviet Union once enjoyed a much greater status than even war heroes or movie stars, and in 1991 Artsybarski was a demigod. He receives me in a suffocatingly warm little office behind a church; his three secretaries are busy filing their nails, Artsybarksi has a Delft-blue astronaut on his desk. These days the former cosmonaut's mission is to save the crippled Mir which is still hanging in orbit, for the greater honour and glory of the Russian fatherland.
While Artsybarski was circling the earth, the Soviet Union was crumbling into the abyss. Gorbachev was fighting with all his might to keep his Communist Party – in his own words ‘this colossus of conservatism … this dirty, mean dog’ – under control. According to his closest aides, Gorbachev clearly realised that the system he had inherited was an obstruction to the country's modernisation. But he underestimated the extent to which that same communism, despite its rigidity, was holding the country together. And he had only a few, vague theories concerning the free, market-oriented system with which he hoped to replace it. To paraphrase the words of the conservative writer Yuri Bondarev: perestroika was a plane that had been ordered to take off, with absolutely no instructions about how
or where to land.
The consequences soon became apparent. In some of the republics, only a quarter of the recruits conscripted into the Soviet Army around 1990 actually reported for duty. In January 1991, a revolt broke out in the three Baltic States. In Vilnius, Soviet troops fought with demonstrators for control of the television-broadcasting tower. Fourteen people were killed. In Riga, the Black Berets, a special unit of the Soviet ministry of internal affairs, stormed the Latvian ministry of internal affairs. Five people were killed. Popular as Mikhail Gorbachev was abroad, his position within the country was growing more feeble all the time.
On 18 August, 1991, while he was on holiday in the Crimea, the Soviet leader received an unexpected visit from a few of his cabinet ministers. They had come to tell him that an emergency committee had been set up in Moscow to save the Soviet Union, that his dacha was surrounded by mutinous troops, and that he would have to hand over the reins to the vice-president, Gennadi Yanayev. Gorbachev refused, but when he tried to call Moscow he discovered that all lines to the outside world had been cut. The next day the conspirators – including members of Gorbachev's own government – held a press conference and declared a state of emergency. For the time being, Yanayev would serve as acting president.
It was an old-fashioned communist takeover, with all the attendant conniving behind the scenes. In the old days it would probably have succeeded, but this was the age of television, a fact the apparatchiks had overlooked: one of their leaders, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, partook of too much liquid courage before his first TV appearance, and once on the air Yanayev was unable to disguise the way his hands were trembling. Meanwhile, millions and millions of Soviet citizens watched as thousands of demonstrators gathered before the parliament building in Moscow to defend the young democracy, as the newly elected Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, climbed onto a tank to demand the immediate release of his Soviet colleague, as army units refused their orders to support the coup and attack the parliament building. Within two days, the palace revolution was over. Yeltsin was more popular than ever, but Gorbachev had been so grievously humiliated – not least by his ‘saviour’ Yeltsin – that his position became untenable. Shortly afterwards, the Communist Party ceased its activities.
